disable formatting and allowing code to be posted

[David Welch]

The web user interface for JIRA gets less usable each iteration, it is now completely unusable.

1) how to completely disable any kind of autoformatting within the comment box?  Plan/normal text as the selected font/style implies rather than something completely different.

2) how to post source code or other text and not have the autoformatting think it is something else.  cant show diff changes for code for example it really mangles that and marking it as code after the fact only makes it mangled with a different font.  Cant mark some text as code first then insert it in the middle that doesnt work either.

3) turn off autocorrect, lots of specific technical terms or industry or company specific names for things that get autocorrected into something unrelated ruining the whole conversation.  Having to constantly be going back and fixing the spelling.  Cannot type normally and quickly have to constantly be fixing what the tool is doing to what is being typed.

4) Can we revert back to a prior user interface?  One that actually works and is productive?  Two versions ago was significantly superior to the last two (the one before that even better), the last one was tolerable.  It wasnt broken why was it changed?  New is definitely not better.  It is currently unusable as is.

[Mykenna Cepek]

It might help to know that the markdown formatting in the Description and Comment fields in Jira is not a pure "rich text" equivalent. You might be used to being able to copy and paste text from Word Processing and Spreadsheet applications (e.g. Word, Excel, etc) freely and have their text attributes maintained. But pasting into any application that utilizes a markup or markdown type of WYSIWYG editor (e.g. Jira, Slack, etc) will not behave that same way, and text metadata will be lost.

Given that, here are some point-by-point thoughts (matching your list above):

1. Probably can't just disable the markdown WYSIWYG capabilities in Jira. Note, however, that you can select all the text you just pasted, and use "Clear formatting" from the toolbar to get it back to plain text. That still might not be what you want in all cases, but I use it often, and then re-mark portions of the text -- to reformat some a list, some as a code block, etc.
2. The link auto-formatting is a recent feature, and I can see it interfering with your efforts to past code that might have Jira keys in comments, for example. Ugh. But you also mention "code diffs", which Jira more natively supports with version control integration (bitbucket, github/gitlab, etc). When I was a developer, linking through from the Jira issue straight to the diff in the code source tool was the way to go.
3. Autocorrect is likely a browser setting. In Chrome, for example: "Preferences > Appearance > Advanced > Languages > Spell Check" allows me to turn it off, and then it disappears from every Jira field (and, unsurprisingly, every other web page). Maybe some other browsers have features to enable/disable this by domain? This was requested in Jira back in 2003, and Atlassian rejected that feature suggestion, since modern browsers (even back then) were the "right place" to implement that.
4. I get that the "way you've worked" isn't in sync with recent updates to Jira. But I assure you that their hundreds of thousands of users aren't struggling this much. Perhaps it's a time to explore ways to evolve how you and your team(s) are working? Code repository integration with Jira to access code diffs, for example, is kind of baseline for many organizations these days.

I'm sure this isn't what you wanted to hear. I get it. An evolving product forces users (and entire organizations) to adapt.

The positive side is that this adaptation journey keeps pace with the industry in general (not just Jira or Atlassian products). 

[jon.gorrono]

Clear formatting is disabled. And I have no idea why. Instead of working, now I'm searching for apparently unfindable docs that explain this behavior.

It is really frustrating. After typing a couple of domain names they are automatically turned into links with titles from the remote site replacing the text typed. It's beyond me why ppl would think this is a good idea for a default behavior.

yes, I can remove the links injected into the textarea but then am left with the remote injected text instead of.... wait for it... .... what I typed there. :0

[jon.gorrono]

BTW... 'an evolving product forces users to adapt' is quite the user-centered design anti-pattern. I've used Jira since Day One for an opensource project and watched its evolution. Not all mutations that lead to evolution are beneficial: they are just what you end up with.  And I think it's important to also recognize that 100's of 1000's of users may actually be unnecessarily struggling with this (I can give you a list of couple dozen from my local experience), but push forward, with hacks to bypass, wasting work time, because they (obviously) have no other choice since all they get are marketers' paternalisms.
(BTW, Atlassian estimated there were about 180,000 users of jira at the time of the comment above: less than 2 "100's of 1000's")